Dying Alone? Rising With Christ

I am terrified of the prospect of dying alone. It feels silly to admit, and I’m often embarrassed that I feel this way and am so incessantly preoccupied by this worry, but I do and I am. I rarely share this fear with others. When I do, it’s usually through a thinly veiled joke that I hope the other person will see through and comment on without me having to ask. “What if i die alone????” I’ll text my friends occasionally, always hoping that they’ll launch immediately into a lieu of reassurances about how I never could given all my many attributes, that there is someone out there for me and it’s just a matter of time until our paths cross, that all my past relationships and heartbreak and regret are leading me somewhere right, etc.

They never respond this way, which is not to say that they are cold or uncaring — they aren’t at all. I think it’s probably just hard to know how to respond via text to a fear disguised as a joke wrapped in a protective layer of irony that is intended to hide but in fact belies a raw and oozing wound.

2024 was the first year in many that I entered with absolutely no romantic entanglements. Since my late teens, there has always been something with someone — either a proper relationship, or a confusing “situationship,” or the near constant text-based flirting that accompanies getting to know someone new in the twenty-first century. “You’re always ‘seeing someone,’’’ a friend observed to me once, but over a year has passed with me seeing no one, at least not more than once or twice. It has been difficult and often quite lonely, but I think that it’s also been necessary, good for me in the way that a morning run is good for me when I’d rather doomscroll in bed. It frankly hasn’t felt very good most of the time, but I can sense that I’m growing from it, even if that growth has yet to fully reveal itself.

Now it’s 2025, and I’ve begun another year with no prospects, and it feels worse this time around. The intentional dating hiatus has become an unintentional one. Last year, the idea of a long break from the pursuit of partnership — something I’d never really allowed myself before — held a certain kind of freedom and excitement. I was “decentering men!” I was “unlearning patriarchal programming!” I was “finding myself!”… all in the name of finding a soulmate. I assumed that it was just a matter of letting enough time pass, as if at some indeterminate point the fates would part the curtains and reveal to me The One as they congratulated me on passing all of their cosmic tests: How to Be Alone, How to Enjoy Your Own Company, How to Love Yourself First So That You Can Truly Love Another. Needless to say, that has not been the case.

It’s hard not to feel like something is wrong with me for being single. I turned 33 in December and spent most of my birthday feeling wistful and sad, thinking that I never would have imagined that I’d be without a spouse or child at this point in my life. In most of my social circles, I am one of the few — and in some cases the only — unmarried ones. More and more of my peers are marrying and applying for mortgages and having children, things that feel so far removed from my day-to-day reality. Meanwhile here I am messaging strangers on Hinge, politely turning down dates once someone reveals that they’re into “ethical non-monogamy” (whatever that means) and swiping left on any man over 35 who lists what he’s looking for as “a short-term relationship, open to long.” Bro, do you know that you are going to die one day? Soon all your relationships will be short term! I want to have a baby in the next five years!

The internet is not the place to go if you’re feeling insecure about the state of love life. Social media is rife with all kinds of people giving you all kinds of explanations for why you’re single, not only licensed therapists trying to make a name for themselves on TikTok but 25-year-old “dating coaches” with no qualifications beyond a self-ascribed title. Go looking for dating advice and soon enough you’ll be bombarded with a litany of everything that might be wrong about you and everything that you’re almost certainly doing wrong. You’re coming on too strong. You don’t love yourself enough. You’re too picky. You’re not picky enough. You’re chasing instead of attracting. You’re anxiously attached or avoidantly attached or, worse, some damnable combination of the two. No matter what, it’s almost certainly your fault and you better find out precisely what is wrong with you and how to fix it or else prepare yourself for a lifetime of loneliness.

My therapist once asked me to journal in response to the question, “What dating advice have you taken as gospel?” I, ever unable to simply keep a thought to myself, balked at “gospel” being used in that way. I explained my theological objections, and I don’t know if she understood my point, but I think that I understood hers — even if it was Law and not Gospel that she was really talking about.

Amid the deluge of internet dating advice are an unwritten set of commands by which we all seem to abide. Wait a day or two before following up after a good date. Don’t rush into exclusivity. Maintain multiple options. Don’t seem too interested. Don’t seem too distant. Absolutely never, ever double text. Above all else, be “chill.” Regardless of wherever these so-called rules originated, I’ve absorbed them all through some kind of cultural osmosis, coming to treat love as something earned through relentless self-improvement and strict adherence to the modern dating doctrine. A relationship is a reward for following all the rules, the thinking goes; love, the conferment of status and confirmation of worth. Never mind that the faith I profess maintains the precise opposite.

The real Gospel, as in the capital-G gospel, bears witness to a love that is freely given, unearned and unconditional. I believe in this Gospel. I preach about it every single Sunday. And yet I’m still here largely behaving as if love is just another thing to strive for, a carrot that dangles on a stick in front of my face and remains tantalizingly out of reach until I make myself worthy of it.

I know that I am far from alone in feeling this way. The dating punditry industrial complex is alive and well, feeding off our inherent desire to love and be loved, and our collective insecurities. These voices promise that if you just do X, your soulmate will suddenly materialize. It’s a seductive — and profitable — lie that keeps us returning for more. When they fail to deliver, they blame you. It’s not the emptiness of their promises or the inanity of reducing a messy and multifaceted human experience into a series of steps; it’s some misstep that you made along the way. It all makes for a cycle meant to keep us hooked while driving us further from love’s true nature. And I’ve fallen for it — hard.

If there is one thing that I’m grateful for about this long stretch of solitude, it’s the realization of all the ways I’ve made an idol out of romance. I have constructed an altar to romantic rejection and spent countless hours lying prostrate before it, hoping that if I just wait there long enough, I’ll be rewarded for my devotion. I have scrutinized text message threads like sacred scripture and turned unanswered ones into holy writ. I have pledged allegiance to the voices that tell me that finding the love I want is entirely in my hands — I just have to make myself hotter, cooler, less anxious, easier going first.

But even beyond the advice I’ve absorbed, the deeper truth is that my approach to dating itself has been fueled by a desperation that I expend tremendous amounts of time and energy trying to keep hidden from others, these weak and insecure parts of myself that I’d rather not think about and seem to grow more powerful the more I try to ignore. The last year has forced me to confront a good many of them: my inability to tell whether I truly like someone or if they’re just there. My tendency to hold onto connections I know aren’t right because the prospect of being alone feels worse than the prospect of unhappily staying. My historic willingness to settle for scraps of attention, convinced that something — anything — is better than nothing. My ego’s compulsion to prove my worth by way of winning someone over.

When it comes down to it, I think that this is the real crux of my dating woes. Not millennial men being by nature non-committal or my past partners’ potentially avoidant attachment styles. Not dating apps being soul-sucking and awful or the unrealistic expectations set by movies and pop culture. Not even my inability to smooth out the rough edges of what an ex-boyfriend once called my “very big personality,” or some fatal flaw that makes me uniquely unlovable and destined to be alone forever. It’s the idolization of romantic love itself, my belief that it is the thing that could make me whole, give my life purpose and depth. I’ve spent so much time chasing this distorted version of love, thinking that if I could just get it right, all the other pieces of my life would fall into place.

My therapist also once asked me to think about how I’d live my life if I knew that I was never going to meet someone — what things might I approach differently, how would I spend my time, where would I seek connection and fulfillment? I cried and told her that I couldn’t do it, that even entertaining that possibility felt like ceding all hope and resigning myself to spinsterdom. “Your life isn’t waiting to begin until you meet your soulmate,” she told me, so gently and kindly that it made me cry again.

She’s right, of course. Life has already begun, and as the late Frederick Buechner once wrote, “Life itself is grace.” This grace cannot be contained and is contingent on nothing about me, not my relationship status, achievements, or even my ability to love myself. It is not waiting to reveal itself in some distant future where all my self-imposed conditions are met. It is here and now, saturating the present reality. It is reality – stronger and realer and truer than anything else. There is nothing without it. I am nothing without it.

The Gospel reveals the love I am really searching for, and it is a love entirely outside of me but is nevertheless for me — and for all of us. It is the love that brought the entire world into being, a love that seeks us out and chases us down, that pursues us relentlessly even when we are running as fast as we can in the opposite direction. It is the love poured out on the cross, a love that does not demand from us perfection or preparedness but meets us in those parts of ourselves that we’d rather keep hidden from the rest of the world. It is the love that does not make us strive or climb up to it but sinks down to the depths of literal hell for our sakes, a love so great it conquered death.

And despite my frequent inability to see or appreciate it, despite my efforts to reject it — whether in my worst moments of doubt or my most stubborn moments of supposed self-sufficiency — that love comes to me. I’ve tried so many times in my life to abandon the faith that makes this love real to me in favor of some version of atheism (often, sadly, in the name of making dating easier). But I can never manage to stay there for long. This love makes sure of that. It has found me and claimed me and will not let me go.

On my better days, I can at least begin to grasp at this truth. But it often eludes me. I find myself struggling to trust that I am loved beyond measure and forgiven of my sins through no effort of my own — there are so many voices seductively whispering otherwise. My fear of dying alone hasn’t vanished, and I don’t know if it ever fully will. But there is another voice — what Henri Nouwen called the “inner voice of love” — that tells me over and over and over again that I already am seen and known and loved, that promises me that I will not die alone because I have already died and risen with Christ Jesus. There but for the grace of God — and with it — I go.